Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 11, 2007

New Ways to Visualize Google Search Results

There's little innovation in the way search results are presented: 10 links followed by some text excerpts. Of course, you can change the number of search results and sometimes view more information about a site, but that's all.

Some mostly unknown search engines like KartOO found different ways of displaying search results. For example, KartOO puts the results on an interactive map. The importance of a page is visually represented by the size of the associated icon and each page is connected to a list of keywords that help you refine your query.

Google felt it's time for a change and will add two new ways to visualize the results of a web search:

* on a timeline. View search results chronologically. Although Google doesn't have a way to determine the date when a web page was created, they can estimate it and offer timeline of the most relevant search results for a query, similar to Google News Archive.

* on a map. Google already associates some web pages with local businesses and shows information about the physical address of a business using a Plus Box. For some queries (like NY spa) there are a lot of local results that could be placed on a Google map, like in Google Base.